That which the Market will bear.
The very definition of Capitalism.
Good stuff.

Here on the mountain, I have a 6 meg DSL connection. With the routing and switching overhead, it *really* means I'm getting right around 5.4 meg.

I pay $40/month.

"Back in the day" a 4.5 MB "T-3" dedicated connection would have run around $7K to $10K for the local loop and an equal amount to the upstream provider.

So everyone who needed more than a T-1 (1.54 MB) would simply "cheat" and order a pair of them (at roughly $5K/mo. total) and arrange for the ISP upstream to "bond" the two connections. cisco (small 'c' intentional) routers are excellent at doing that, and automatically balancing the load between the two lines. Need more than 3.1MB? Just order that third T-1 and use that magic router to bond it to the other two. Monthly cost would be right around $8K total. And you'd have the rough equivalent to the T-3 at about a third the cost. We had a customer doing that. Just one. Most of our commercial customers were other ISPs, more than content with an "ordinary" T-1.

The other way of "cheating" was the "frame relay cloud" connection. I simply refused to sell it. Yes, it could "burst" to 4.5M on demand, but the telco seemed to have a hard time keeping it working. Conspiracy at work. It was very affordable (compared to a T-3) and the telco probably screwed with it to keep folks from "cannibalizing" their "real connection" customer base.

One thing has not changed since back then.

Telcos (the ILEC ones) are evil.
All of them.
Without exception.

T3 is 45mbps...

Ah, but he didn't say 4.5 mbps, he said "4.5 MB" which means "4.5 megabytes" which is roughly 45 megabits...

Or he simply screwed up :)

I get it, though. Back in those days I designed and built a lot of private WANs, and for a "middle" bandwidth like that we always had to price out "fractional T3" vs. "bonded T1s"

Nowadays it's so much easier; even for private circuits, as long as you're in a "lit building" the telco simply hands you a piece of Ethernet.

or burstable T3...

It is refreshing to note that *some* people *do* understand abbreviations and their relation to scientific notation.... <evil grin>

...or is that <evil Mgrin>....

Har har. The point is, a T3 is not ~3 T1's!
More like 30.

How *did* they deliver T3 circuits to "unlit" buildings? Did they actually sling coaxial cable from the street? I've only seen T3's in buildings that had a telco rack with fiber, and the coax was delivered from there to the CPE inside the building.

We had OC3 to the "breakout hardware" (fiber optic loop converter) on the wall in our machine room. I forget the exact bandwidth of OC3, but 155 megabits/sec comes to mind, may be more.

OC3 is 155 Mbps. I'm wondering whether telco was ever willing to deliver T3 circuits to premises that *didn't* have SONET on-premises.

That would be impossible, right? I'm hearing that coax DS3 needs a repeater every 600 feet, which is prohibitive. The only other option is ganging a huge quantity of T1's or outsourcing it to local cable television monopoly.

Hmm, it seems you are correct. A bit more Googling reveals that the distance limitation of DS3 is 225 feet when using 26 gauge coax, and 450 feet when 20 gauge.

Thank goodness those days are over. :) As a data center operator I can attest that almost nobody orders DS3 circuits anymore. There are a few niche areas, such as channelized voice-based applications that haven't been moved to SIP yet, but even those are on their way out. And *absolutely* nobody orders unchannelized DS3 for data carriage anymore.

These days it's all metro ethernet. T1's are still around for the poor sods who are stuck in unlit buildings, of course.

Buried deep in a source module that doesn't get updating because it doesn't need to change ... but the old date looks ... old.

Just gonna take it out completely :)

The company I work for still deals with lot of DS3 connections - A lot are from their past history as a CLEC provider, but there is a lot of current use for 911 call delivery.

That still seems to be the most popular use, anything involving channelization.

Misparsed:

"... anything involving cannibalization."

Well, cannibalization is a quite elegant form of recursion...

Hmm... self-cannibalizing code seems appropriate when working with Windows.